Objective Verification of Storm-Scale FV3 Configurations in the Hazardous Weather Testbed

During the 2018 NOAA/Hazardous Weather Testbed Spring Forecasting Experiment (SFE2018), the National Severe Storms Laboratory, Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, and Center for Analysis and Prediction of Storms at the University of Oklahoma contributed real-time, experimental, storm-scale configurations of the Finite Volume Cubed Sphere Model (FV3) for severe weather forecasting and model evaluation activities. The FV3 was selected to replace the GFS as part of the Next Generation Global Prediction System (NGGPS) program, and NOAA plans for the FV3 to be the foundation of a unified modeling suite encompassing all prediction time and space scales currently under the purview of NOAA’s Environmental Modeling Center. In this plan, FV3 will eventually be the operational dynamical core for regional deterministic and ensemble systems, replacing current systems like the North American Mesoscale Model (NAM), Short Range Ensemble Forecast System (SREF), and the High-Resolution Rapid Refresh Model (HRRR). However, testing of FV3 at convective scales has been very limited and the capability to run as a “stand-alone” regional model is still being fully developed. Thus, to accelerate model development for high resolution applications, efforts are needed to provide insights into model behavior at convective scales, evaluate forecast performance, and compare against current state-of-the-art operational prediction models. This study will work towards this goal by leveraging the datasets from SFE2018. Specifically, in this poster, FV3 forecast performance for severe weather and QPF will be presented and compared with operational systems like the HRRR.